The film maker Jean Luc Godard said, 'If you want to say something, the only solution is to say it.' This is in the context of his general statement that all of his films are effectively essays, but that their proper form was that of narrative fiction films.
Godard is the great alienator among sixties filmmakers. He uses formal filmmaking devices such as jump cuts and direct addresses to camera to distantiate the viewer and comment on the act of viewing itself and, where he wants to include a passage of general theory, he simply puts it into the mouth of one of his characters and has them speak it. In other words, where a writer like Ayn Rand or Camus uses the narrative as a means of carrying the philosophical message, Godard's message is, or is bound up with, a comment on the nature of the medium itself. Another way of putting it might be, Rand and Camus feel that their philosophical points require a (didactic) story to come across; Godard feels that he wants to draw our attention to the process of experiencing a story by breaking it - and perhaps, in doing so, point out that a lot of the stories we experience are more didactic than they're letting on. In a sense it's a move in the opposite direction from that of Rand or Camus: where they convert philosophy into narrative, Godard converts narrative back into philosophy. I prefer Godard's move. Rand and Camus seem to feel that using narrative will make their philosophy more 'immediate' to us, but actually, whatever their merits, we always end up with implausible characters who are simply ciphers for philosophical ideas. Godard's implausible characters are simply ciphers for the philosophical idea that they are something separate from reality, something constructed. This admission makes the philosophy more immediate (im-mediate), directely addressing the fact that what we are watching is a mediated experience, an experience of media.
No one's talked about Sartre, who wrote plays, novels and straight works of philosophy. Compare Nausea to Being and Nothingness and it seems clear he must have had quite different senses of the roles of these two books. The former is a much more emotional attempt to come to terms with the frightening strangeness of life.
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Originally Posted by blp
